‘Justice is long overdue’ for training school survivors, says MP who spent three ‘painful’ years at one

David Sweet walks slowly down a snow-covered laneway cutting through the campus of what used to be St. Joseph’s Training School, a residential reform institution for boys deemed “delinquent” or “unmanageable” decades ago by the courts.

It’s early January and Sweet, a Conservative MP, is walking a reporter and photographer through the site of the former school in the small Ontario town of Alfred, about 70 kilometres east of Ottawa. It was here that Sweet says he spent three “painful” years between the ages of 13 and 15 in the early 1970s, after being sent to the school for running away from his home in Kingston and stealing a few cars.

Sweet, who is the national Conservative caucus chair, is now going public with his experiences at St. Joseph’s, he says, to lend his voice to a growing number of former training school students telling their stories of abuse. He is also calling for a public inquiry into that abuse.

Sweet pauses and points at the top floor of the three-storey building that housed upward of 150 boys at any one time between 1933 and the mid-1970s. St. Joseph’s was one of two reform schools for boys operated by Christian Brothers, a Roman Catholic lay order, but funded by the provincial government. The site of St. Joseph’s is now a French-language college.

Sweet narrowly escaped a frightening encounter here with a Christian Brother who invited the then 13-year-old Sweet to his bedroom.

“I was conscious of something that wasn’t right then, but knowing what I know now, I realize just how fortunate I was to have refused his invitation,” said Sweet, who was first elected in 2006 and represents the riding of Flamborough-Glanbrook, part of the greater city of Hamilton.

MP David Sweet, who represents Flamborough-Glanbrook, stands in front of the former site of St. Joseph's Training School in Alfred, Ontario, this month. Sweet is speaking out about the abuse he suffered, and witnessed at the school, now a French-language college, while he lived there in the early 1970s. (Randy Risling / Toronto Star)

Those who would benefit most from a public inquiry are former abused students of as many as a dozen secular training schools, about which the provincial government has largely kept silent. People like Mary Ceretti, who was one of the first girls sent to Pine Ridge Training School in Bowmanville in the 1970s, and Sanford Cottrelle, who spent six years being shuffled through six training schools after being removed from his home on the Aamjiwnaang First Nation near Sarnia.

Like many former students, neither Ceretti, 56, nor Cottrelle, 56, have received any official acknowledgment of, or compensation for, the abuse they say they suffered at the hands of provincial government employees.

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The Ministry of the Attorney General says there are “more appropriate ways” than a public inquiry to support survivors.

Lawyers who have represented training school abuse survivors believe there could be thousands of victims from the secular system alone.

“What happened at these training schools was not right,” said Ceretti, who alleges she was physically, sexually and emotionally abused for two years, including being forced to have an abortion. “It changed me. I’m an alcoholic, I don’t trust anybody. I don’t have any friends.”

“All they did was screw people up more,” Cottrelle said. “They called it a training school but they trained us to be a--holes.”

Sweet wonders how much longer former abused students will have to wait for justice. “It’s time for the general public to know what happened,” he said. “Justice is long overdue.”

Mary Ceretti, 56, was sent to Pine Ridge Training School in Bowmanville, Ont., in 1976, at the age of 14. While there, she says she was subjected to sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, and was forced to have an abortion. (Randy Risling)

Early one evening in the summer of 1971, Sweet had been assigned to mop the dormitory where every night as many as 50 rambunctious boys between the ages of 12 and 16 were expected to say their prayers and sleep soundly. Few did.

Suddenly, in the doorway, André Charbonneau, a large hulk of a man known as Brother André, or “The Horse,” because of his athletic prowess, appeared and called Sweet over.

Would the boy please come into his bedroom?

“By that time, I had heard stories about what Brother André did to other boys — the molestations, the beatings. I just knew in my gut it wasn’t the right thing, so I dropped the mop and took off,” said Sweet, now 60. “I think what saved me from not being summoned back was we were just then called for dinner.”

Sweet’s encounter was a close call. Others weren’t so lucky. More than 20 years later, following a police investigation into allegations of abuse at St. Joseph’s and another Catholic reform school, St. John’s Training School in Uxbridge, Charbonneau pleaded guilty to 17 charges, including sodomy of five victims, and indecent assault. He was sentenced to six years in prison.

Charbonneau was one of 30 Christian Brothers at the schools who was charged criminally in the 1990s for their alleged abuse of students from the 1950s to the 1970s. More than two dozen were convicted.

In the mid-1990s, the archdioceses of Ottawa and Toronto, the Ontario government and the Ottawa-based Christian Brothers contributed to a $14-million compensation fund for about 1,000 former students. In 2004, then-premier Dalton McGuinty issued a public apology.

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As for Sweet’s call for a public inquiry, Andrew Rudyk, a spokesperson for the Ministry of the Attorney General, said the government believes there are “more appropriate ways” to support survivors “given that public inquiries are meant to prevent future similar tragedies, and that the use of training schools ended in Ontario over three decades ago.”

“It is our commitment that if other children suffered similar trauma, we will work with them to address that harm and make sure something like this never happens again,” Rudyk said.

Sweet says he chose not to participate in the St. Joseph’s and St. John’s compensation fund because others were more deserving. By his mid-20s, he had found Christianity and managed to pull his life together. He became an entrepreneur and raised five children with this wife, Almut.

But the memories haunt him.

Life was hard growing up poor in Kingston. Sweet’s father, Gordon, joined the Canadian army at age 14, rising to the rank of sergeant before being discharged. His mother, Jean, struggled with mental health demons while trying to raise Sweet and his five siblings on her husband’s modest salary as a TV repairman.

Sweet was the third youngest, and just never found school interesting or engaging. He would often act up. When he was 12, at a loss as to how to deal with his parents’ alcohol abuse and an unstable home life, he ran away and lived on the streets of Kingston for several months. When he was 13, he stole a few cars and went joyriding. When he was caught, a judge sent him to St. Joseph’s.

His arrival at the school was bewildering. Everything was in French and Sweet didn’t speak a word.

His brother, Paul, a year his junior, was already at the school but they were immediately separated when Sweet was moved to the senior side because of his height and age. (Paul would remain at the school for six years.)

The brothers would often see each other in the halls, but never had classes together.

Sweet describes life as hopeless, dreary and oppressive at a school where they were taught little about how to function as productive members of society.

(To this day, he refuses to refer to St. Joseph’s as a training school. “If it was a training school that would mean that you’d be taught something.”)

Fear permeated the boys’ lives. The smallest of transgressions — a wrong word, a step out of line — could be met with a host of humiliating punishments and often, violence. Slaps, punches and kicks were commonplace.

“There was never really any clear explanation of what you did wrong,” Sweet said. “By any standard, you were in a no-win situation.”

Once, Sweet was made to scrub walls with bleach for three hours using his bare hands after doing something — he can’t remember what — that displeased the brothers.

“The disdain of that stuck with me for about 20 years because of the pain in my hands and forearms,” he said.

When fights erupted, the guards were content to let the boys beat each other up. “They wouldn’t intervene in a fight unless it was very serious. To them, it was just extra management if they went in too early.”

Being tall for his age, and skinny, Sweet was a natural target for bullies. He became an expert in curling up in the fetal position to limit damage from kicks and punches, he says.

There were the ever-present whispers of sexual abuse. Sweet says some boys would talk of being touched inappropriately by some of the brothers.

“But what could we do? You learned quickly who to avoid,” he said.

The first Catholic training school, St. John’s Industrial School, opened in 1895 in Toronto and was moved to a farm near Uxbridge in the late 1950s.

St. Joseph's Training School is pictured in a postcard from the 1950s.

In 1925, the first non-Catholic training school opened in Bowmanville with the enrolment of 16 boys. In 1931, the province passed the Ontario Training Schools Act, formalizing the schools’ existence. The province directly ran more than a dozen schools between 1925 and 1984, with thousands of children passing through the doors.

The schools were established to “provide the boys or girls therein with a mental, moral, physical and vocational education, training and employment,” according to the 1950 version of the act. Section 7 allowed a judge to send any boy or girl to a training school for a variety of reasons, including if the child is found “begging,” “wandering,” “destitute” or “proves unmanageable or incorrigible.”

Children who had committed all manner of crimes that would have resulted in jail time had they been adults were mixed in with those who had done little more than skip school or run away from home.

Kids like Mary Ceretti, who left home when she was 12.

The oldest of five children, Ceretti says the neglect and abuse she suffered at the hands of her parents — a poor, working-class couple in Hamilton — became unbearable. She started living on the streets and was moved in and out of foster and group homes.

“My parents didn’t want me back,” said Ceretti, who became a Crown ward.

In 1976, she was declared “incorrigible” by a family court judge and sent to Pine Ridge Training School.

Within six months, a male staffer was visiting a bedroom at night and abusing girls. The staffer would sit beside one girl at a time.

“He would pet my head, rub my face, he’d grab your hand and put it under all his fat, and it would be all wet and gross,” Ceretti said. She is one of more than two dozen former students who reached out to the Star after the investigation appeared last month. “It’s not acceptable, but I know people have had it worse.”

Ceretti’s deepest scars result from the school forcing her to get an abortion when she was 16.

She had returned to Pine Ridge in 1977 after running away from a foster home and living with a male friend. She didn’t know she was pregnant until a staffer sat her down and listed reasons why she couldn’t keep the baby. The school then sent her to a Toronto clinic.

“The baby was too far in, so they stuck this silver prod into my stomach to induce the labour and kill the baby,” Ceretti said, wiping away tears. “I think the worst part was you actually go into labour . . . they don’t come in there and help you. They don’t do nothing.

“I gave birth to this baby. It was laying right there, blood everywhere. And they left me like that, not for real long, but they left me like that. You have to sit there with blood and a dead baby.”

It was a boy.

She never sued the province because she didn’t know that was an option.

“I just went on with my life after that,” said Ceretti, who now works as a cook.

Like Ceretti, Sanford Cottrelle still bears scars from his time in training school. At 10 years old, Cottrelle, who is Indigenous, was taken from his home on the Aamjiwnaang First Nation and sent to White Oaks, a training school that assigned boys to live in a series of houses in Hagersville.

For six years at six different schools, Cottrelle was subjected to a range of abuse, including beatings, racist name-calling and staff-sanctioned fights between students.

Cottrelle recalls a time he refused to wear the Cub Scout beanie to a meeting at White Oaks. A staffer dragged Cottrelle by his hair and kicked him repeatedly in his torso.

Sanford Cottrelle, 56, was sent to White Oaks Village, a training school in Hagersville, in 1971 when he was just 10 years old. He says a public inquiry is needed to expose the abuse he and others suffered at these schools at the hands of staff. (Randy Risling)

“The humiliation of having that done in front of a large group of people . . . for years I lived with this idea of getting revenge on this guy. It’s a good thing our paths never crossed,” said Cottrelle, who now lives in London.

At White Oaks, Cottrelle began to have suicidal thoughts. He turned to drugs and alcohol and became a voracious reader, he says, to keep his mind from suicide.

After training schools, Cottrelle led a hard life of homelessness, jail time for armed robbery and assault, and several suicide attempts.

“In all truth, I don’t even think I should be walking this world considering all this stuff,” said Cottrelle, who was forced to go on disability after breaking his hip, and developed a heart condition and PTSD.

He says it’s time for the province to acknowledge publicly the effects training schools had on former students.

“As far as I can tell, they had absolutely nothing in place to help steer kids away from behavioural problems.”

On the third floor of St. Joseph’s, Sweet takes a moment to compose himself before leading a reporter and photographer to a hallway, now walled up, where the school’s solitary confinement cells once stood. Sweet did three stints here. Students would be locked in the four-by-six foot rooms with just a steel bed and a toilet. They would be let out to brush their teeth for a few minutes every day but for no more than that, he says.

Sweet once spent 10 days in solitary following an escape attempt. It was around Easter 1972 and Sweet, then about 15, had reached a low point.

“It was just misery. I was getting beaten up. I had no hope of getting out of there. I felt like my life was just bleeding away,” he said.

One evening, he convinced a guard that he had been asked by a priest to help with an Easter service. The guard gave him a pass that would allow Sweet to access a part of the building where he knew one door was always kept open.

Sweet and a couple of others took off across a field and followed the railway tracks west for about 10 kilometres before being picked up by the OPP, handcuffed and sent back.

They were immediately thrown into solitary, though later that night, the boys were stripped down to their underwear and made to run around in the outdoor courtyard for what felt like hours.

On the other occasions he was sent to solitary, Sweet was actually grateful because it meant he didn’t have to worry about getting beaten up. “I’m a glass half-full guy.”

One of the stories in last month’s investigation detailed the case of a housemaster of a training school in Hagersville who was acquitted of 15 counts of sex-related charges in relation to five students during the 1960s and ’70s. The judge characterized the complainants as “unsavoury” and noted they all had “significant criminal records and dysfunctional lifestyles.”

“It upset me to know that there was a possibility that individuals wouldn’t receive justice because of behaviour that could very well have been a consequence of their maltreatment at training school,” Sweet said.

“If you take kids as young as 8, 10, or 12, put them in an abusive environment hundreds of kilometres away from their homes with no hope, no clear path to getting out, and no clear education about what success is, what kind of behaviour do you expect them to exhibit?”

Sweet was also motivated to tell his story by the suicide of his 23-year-old daughter, Lara, who died of a drug overdose on Aug. 11, 2017, in an Oshawa rooming house. Lara had struggled with addiction and mental health issues all her life, but in recent years seemed to be turning her life around.

“Advocating for those with mental health issues is obviously close to my heart and I think mental health is a big concern for young people that were incarcerated,” Sweet said. “Back when training schools were around, there wasn’t the capacity to diagnose, so you were institutionalized. And that just exacerbated the problems.